NINTH AVENUE
·NINTH·
AVENUE
_By_
MAXWELL
BODENHEIM
[Illustration]
_New York_
BONI & LIVERIGHT
1926
COPYRIGHT 1926 :: BY
BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
[Illustration]
PART ONE
NINTH AVENUE
CHAPTER I
When the light of morning touches the buildings and pavements of a
city, it always seems to borrow their hardness and to lose in some
degree its quality of flowing detachment. The Sunday morning that
fell upon Ninth Avenue, New York City, gave you a sense of invisible
stiffness in its very air. The buildings, with their smudged, flat
fronts and tops, presented the impression of huge warehouses stretching
down both sides of the street--the appearance of holding commodities
rather than human beings. Most of them were five or six stories in
height, and their curtained, oblong windows and the bright, tawdry
shops at their base had an oddly lifeless aspect, in spite of the
sounds and animations which occurred within and around them. The iron
elevated-railroad structure that extended down the street, with all of
its roar and rush of trains, could not destroy the spirit of silent
inertia that lurked within the scene.
Blanche Palmer stood in front of a bureau, in one of the apartments
that lined the street, and combed her dark red, bobbed hair, as
though it were a sacred and perilous performance. She was only
partially dressed, and the mild light that came in through a rear
window from the courtyard brought an extra vividness to her semiplump
arms, abruptly rounded shoulders and moderately swelling bosom.
Their freshness stood out, a little forlorn and challenging, in the
disordered room with its half drab and half gaudy arrangements.
The brass bed, the magazine-posters of pretty women against the
pink-flowered wallpaper, the red plush chair with the most infinitely
smug of shapes, the white chintz, half-dirty curtain and dark green
shade at the window--all of them seemed to be meanly contending against
the youth and life of her body.
She was fairly tall, with most of the weight of her body centered below
her waist and with an incongruously small torso, but this effect was
not as clumsy as it might have been, since it was relieved by a bold
approach to symmetry. Something of a child and an amazon met in her
body. Her face was not pretty if you examined each of its features
separately--the overwide lips, the nose tilting out too suddenly at the
tip, and the overstraight, shaved eyebrows--but the whole of it had a
piquant and enticing irregularity, and it was redeemed by her large,
deeply set, bluish-gray eyes and the fine smoothness of her cream-white
skin.
Her twenty years of life had given her a self-consciousness, and a
hasty worldly wisdom, and a slightly complacent sexual alertness, and
these three qualities blended into the customary expressions on her
face. Yet at odd moments it showed questioning and dissatisfied shades.
She was just a little more frank and wondering than the other girls in
her environment--just a little distressed and seeking beneath all of
the affected wrigglings, and ignorances, and small, cruel impulses that
ruled her heart and mind. As she stood before the bureau, the treble of
a child’s voice emerged from the babble of sounds in the surrounding
apartments, lifting the words: “Well, it ain’t gonna rain no mo-ore,
it ain’t gonna rain no mo-ore; how in the heck can I wash my neck when
it ain’t gonna rain no mo-ore.” Blanche took up the song, half humming
it as she slipped on an old, black, sleeveless evening gown which she
still kept to wear about the apartment when visitors were not present
or expected. It had a big, scarlet satine flower sewed at the side of
the waist and was extremely low-necked and gave her a near-courtesan
touch, increased by the over-thick rouge and lipstick on her face. She
could not dispense with cosmetics, even before her family, because
they were too inherently a part of the shaky sexual pride within her,
which always needed to be glossed and protected because it had been
frequently hurt and discountenanced in competitions and comparisons
with the other girls in her life.
She stepped down the dark hallway and entered the living-room, where
her family sat and pored over the Sunday papers. The hour was verging
on noon, and the debris and confusion of a past breakfast stood on the
square, uncovered table in the middle of the room. Blanche eyed it
peevishly.
“Oh, for Gawd’s sake, what a dump,” she said. “How’m I going to sit
down with gue and coffee all over the chairs?”
“Too bad about you,” her brother, Harry, answered, with an amiable jeer
in his voice. “Too bad. We’ll move up on the Drive an’ get a lotta
servunts for you, huh?”
“Sure, go ahead, but as long’s we’re not there yet you c’n move your
big legs and help clean off the table,” she replied.
“Whatsamatter, you parulyzed?” he asked, still genial as he rose and
picked up some of the dishes.
Her sister Mabel and her oldest brother, Philip, joined in the slangy,
waggish repartee as Blanche went to the kitchen and came back with
a cup of coffee and a fried egg. The father chortled behind the
comic-section of one of the papers, oblivious to this usual Sunday
morning “kidding-match,” and the mother was busy in the kitchen.
Harry Palmer, known to the bantam-class of the prize-fighting ring as
Battling Murphy, was a youth of twenty-two, with a short body whose
shoulders and chest were full, hard lumps, and whose legs were thinly
crooked but steel-like. His small, black eyes had a dully fixed,
suspicious, partly dumb and partly cunning look that never left them,
even in the midst of his greatest smiles and laughters, and his nose
was shaped like the beginning of a corkscrew, and his thick lips just
touched each other, with the lower one slightly protruding. His moist
black hair was brushed backward; his skin was a dark brown with a dab
of red running through it. The start of a primitive man, forced to
become tricky and indirect as it escaped from the traps and ways of
city streets, but still longing for direct blows and curses, showed
on every inch of him. He was cruel without wit enough to know that
he was cruel, and in his most lenient and joking moments the little
imagination and sentiment that he had grew large in its own estimation
and made him feel that he was as decent and kind as he could be in a
life where you had to “put it over” the other fellow, or go under.
He prided himself especially on his generous and affectionate attitude
toward his family. They were the only people who had any actual
claims on him--his own flesh and blood, yep--but he felt that it was
necessary to hurt them whenever they objected to his actions, or tried
to hold him down, or did anything that they should not have done. His
idea of superiority was not to allow any one to boss him unless it
contributed to his material gain, and to order people around whenever
he could. Part of his family-pride was a real emotion and part of it
was a dogged peace-offering to his more openly selfish and cruel words
and actions to other people. He looked upon women as creatures made
for his particular enjoyment, but they alone were able to revive the
streak of surlily shamefaced tenderness within him, and if they were
exceptionally good-looking, and besieged by troubles, he wanted to pet
them and give them money. He intended to avoid marriage until he met a
pretty girl of his own age, who would refuse to give herself to him,
and who could hold her own in the rough parryings of conversation, and
show a practical disposition and a sense of the value of money.
He had fought in preliminary six-round bouts--with erratic
success--since he was twenty, and he was known to the ring as a
courageous but unscientific fighter, whose main fault was that he would
not train rigorously for his encounters. On the side he was associated
with a gang of bootleggers, in the position of a guard who often went
with them to protect their deliveries, receiving a small share of the
profits. The Palmer family was mainly dependent on his support, since
his other brothers and sisters did little more than pay their own
expenses, and his earnings for the past two years had really lifted
them to a point where they could have deserted their upper-proletarian
life. His parents preferred the Ninth Avenue apartment and its
surroundings, because it had been stamped into their spirits for years,
and because they liked the boisterous freedoms, the lack of etiquette,
and the semiunderworld plainness of their environment. He and his
brothers and sisters would not have been averse to moving to “a sweller
joint,” but the desire was not yet sufficiently deep to stir them to
any action.
His older brother, Philip, who was twenty-five, was looked upon as the
most “high-toned” member of the family. Philip worked in a neighboring
drug store and studied at night to become a pharmacist, and had had two
years of a high-school education. He was a tall man of much less sturdy
physique than his brother, and he dressed in the manner of a lower
dandy, with much fussing over cravats, shirts and suits of clothes. He
had a weak face beneath his curly brown hair--the face of a sneaking
philanderer, invaded a bit by kindly impulses which he tried to
suppress but which often led to his undoing. His brown, bulging eyes,
soft mouth that tried to be hard, and tilting out nose inherited from
his mother--these features disputed the sneering nonchalance with which
he strove to become one with the life around him. He was not naturally
studious, but his brain was cautious enough to realize that he was not
adapted for the more arduously physical tasks in life, and that he
would have to learn--at any cost--some sheltering and fairly profitable
profession. For this reason he applied himself to absorbing the details
of pharmacy, with much laboring and many secret groans.
His sister Mabel was the adored young coquette of the family. They
regarded Blanche as a silly, fluctuating, and slightly queer person in
comparison to her sister, for Blanche made no serious effort “to play”
men for their money and favors, and often went out with the poorer and
more ordinary youths of the neighborhood, and revealed, in the opinion
of her family, a spirit that was too jauntily reckless--too “easy.”
Mabel, on the other hand, was reckless enough, with her cabaret,
private club and automobile parties, but the recklessness was more a
patent exuberance used to cover up an excellent canniness. Her people
had the feeling that she could not be taken advantage of, and that she
would play the game carefully until she landed a wealthy man willing
to marry her. Physically, she was a girl of eighteen years, with her
body in that fetching state of transition between budding and maturity;
mentally, she was twelve years old; and emotionally, she was a woman
of fifty. Girls of her kind, whose environment has been split between
their homes in an almost slummy district and the falsetto battle of
Broadway, become sensually wise overnight. At eighteen, Mabel was
literally stuffed with tricks, and informations, and cool wiles picked
up on streets and in cabarets, and her mind merely functioned as an
assistant in this process. At the very bottom she was sentimental and
fearful, but only an actually dire predicament could have extracted
these qualities--an unexpected danger or calamity. She was close to
medium height, with a slenderness made charming by an unusually full
bosom, and a pale brown skin that had a sheen upon it like that on the
surface of a pond, and black, bobbed hair that was curled for three or
four days after each visit to the beauty parlor. Her little nose was
almost straight, with hardly a trace of the Palmer curve, and her lips
were loosely parted and petite, and her big, black eyes assumed the
most vacantly innocent of stares, unless she was angry, when the lids
half closed between dancing sparks.
Her father, William Palmer, had worked as a bartender, during the
days when his country had not yet established a new and widespread
class of criminals, and he had once owned a small saloon, afterwards
lost through his dice and poker-playing lusts. After the advent of
prohibition, he had branched out as a bootlegger, in a very modest way,
but he lacked the vigor and acumen necessary to such an occupation--he
was now a man of fifty-five--and the arrest of some of his cronies had
frightened him into giving up his illegal trade. Then he became the
ostensible manager of his prize-fighting son, and now he did little
more than hang around the gymnasiums where his son trained, dicker for
a few minutes with the owners of boxing clubs, loaf around his home,
and sit in all-night drinking and poker parties. He still had the
remains of a once powerful body, in spite of his lowered shoulders and
grayish-black hair slowly turning to baldness, and he was one of those
men who hold out against dissipation with an inhuman tenacity, until
near seventy, when their hearts or stomachs abruptly collapse, and they
die. He was of average height and always tried to carry himself with
a great, chipper bluff at youthful spryness. Upon his brown face the
twisted nose which he had given to his son, Harry, stood above broad
and heavy lips, and there was a piggish fixity to his often bloodshot
eyes that were too little for the ample size of his head.
He was a man who lived in two worlds at the same time--that of verbal
bluffing, uttered to soothe and shun the sore spots and cruel resolves
in his nature, and that one in which he endlessly schemed for money
and ease, and was willing to commit any legal or well-hidden crime to
procure them. He would have grown wrathful if you had accused him of
being dishonest, and his rage would have been quite sincere. He had
practiced self-deception for such a long time that each part of him
was genuinely blind to the tactics and purposes of the other part. His
children were, to him, the great, living boast with which he could
dismiss the world’s and his own allegations of failure. “I never got
what I wanted but I’ll be damned if they don’t,” he sometimes muttered
to himself, and the excuse that he gave himself was that their better
advantages, and his own guidance, would enable them to win out in the
virtues which he had transplanted within them. He had lost his own
parents at an early age and had been raised in a public institution,
and had been forced to work hard when he was not yet fifteen, and he
doted on citing these beginnings as an explanation for all of his
material failures. He had punished and commanded his children when
they were still in knee trousers and short skirts--often shouting at
them and beating them about the legs--and he had struggled outragedly
against their gradual assumption of authority and independence, but
his delight in remaining their master had finally subsided to an
even stronger pleasure--that of a man who was watching the masterful
qualities which his children had derived from him.
“They get it honest, all right,” he had once said to himself, after
a squabble in which his son Harry, then seventeen, had threatened to
knock him out. “I never took any sass from anybody myself, you bet I
didn’t. They’ll never learn to fight for themselves ’f I take all the
spunk and pep outa them.”
Now he clung to the gruff pose of ordering them about, but never really
cared when they disregarded most of his words, or talked back to him,
as long as the boys kept out of arrest and the girls did not seem to
be openly or particularly unvirtuous. He suspected that his daughters
had probably “gone the limit” with one or two men whom they knew, but
the absence of feminine virtue to him was not a matter for agitation
unless it was persistent, complete and loudly flaunted. He wanted
his daughters to be “wise” and to end up in decent marriages, but he
was not averse to their “cutting up” a bit, as long as they kept it
well hidden. His favorite children were Harry and Mabel and he never
overlooked any chance to flatter and serve them in some manner.
His wife, Kate, was the least aggressive member of the family, and
her children, Philip and Blanche, held in a much-qualified way many
of her characteristics. Two years younger than her husband, she was
a lean and not oversturdy woman whose head rose only an inch above
his shoulders. She had been a servant girl just migrated from Ireland
when he--a bartender in the block in which she lived--had married her
because of his inability to seduce her in spite of her meek worship
of him, and because her turn of figure and her tart, fresh face had
appealed to him. She had toiled most of her life, with only a short
period of intermission before the birth of her first child, and she
had frequently taken his drunken blows and his palpable faithlessness
after the first two years of their marriage, and they had often lived
in the dirtiest and most hellish of poverties when his gambling losses
had reduced them to pennilessness, but something like a mangled dream
had never left her spirit--not plaintive, and not precisely wistful,
but more the quietness of a peasant girl never quite living in her
surroundings and always longing for the strong peace of village and
hill. The dream was stupid, maligned, numb--but still it persisted. She
had little courage, and yet a stubborn flare of it often shot out when
she was driven into a corner, and her main reliances were obstinacy and
endurance. Unlike her husband, she did not share the bragging illusions
which he had concerning their children, and she felt that her sons and
daughters were imperfect, overwild and far too selfish, and she cared
for them more because life had deprived her of all other opportunities
for compensation. She favored Blanche most because Blanche seemed to
her to be more of a reproduction of what she, the mother, had been in
her own girlhood. It was not that she had any keen insight into her
daughter’s character and needs--it was only the very cloudy but warm
feeling that Blanche was more honest and “fine” than the rest of her
children. Mrs. Palmer had long since ceased to love her husband, or
to respect anything about him except his physical strength and his
masculine braveries, but she had fallen into a rut of obedience to him,
from which she lacked even the desire to extricate herself, and she
preserved an attitude of bare affection, to impress her children and
to keep him in good humor whenever she could. She had rigid notions
concerning honesty and morality not held by the rest of her family,
and she often weakly complained against their “looseness” and accepted
it only because she could not change it. Below her still abundant,
grayish-red hair, her face was like the seamed and puffed and violated
copy of Blanche’s countenance, with much the same eyes, lips and nose,
but without the hopeful smiles and uncertain questions on the other’s
face.
As the family gathered in the living-room on this Sunday noon,
chaffing and listening to the latest fox-trot and waltz records from
the slightly nasal phonograph that stood on a shaky table in a corner
of the room, and reading the papers with the jealous, spellbound
attention with which obscure people greet the notorieties and “stunts”
of other men and women, the mother still worked in the kitchen,
cleaning the breakfast dishes and preparing the five o’clock Sunday
dinner. Kate Palmer usually refused to allow her girls to help her
with the housework, for more or less selfish reasons, because of her
pitiful pride in the fact that she could manage things herself--the
elderly housewife, to whom work had become an only distraction and
importance--and because she really dreaded the possibility of their
attractive, feminine hands becoming “chapped and ugly-like.” On
Sundays the Palmers, in varying degrees, were always in their best
mood. They had all slept later than on other days, and the Sabbath-day
was associated in their spirits with “sorta making up for what you
pulled off during the week”--the faint, uncomprehended return of
conscience and forgotten religious precepts--and with more peaceful
forms of enjoyment. Early every Sunday morning the mother went to
a Presbyterian church on the outskirts of their neighborhood, and
sometimes her husband or one of her daughters would accompany her,
both of them stiffly empty and ill-at-ease. If you had asked all of
the Palmers whether they believed in God and in Christianity, they
would instantly have replied in the affirmative, after giving you
a wondering, suspicious look, and yet their belief was merely the
snubbed but never-quite-relinquished shield which their fears became
conscious of at rare and odd moments. In case you died, you wanted to
know that you were on the right side of things and in line for some
possible reward--this was the only shape that religion had to them.
Its exhortations and restrictions were jokes that could not possibly
survive in the sordidness, and strain, and sensual longing of your
life--you knew that at the bottom but you never admitted it to yourself
on the top. Again, there was a consolation, dim and yet imperative, in
feeling that a vast, hazy, grand Father was controlling their days,
and in moments of sore need, or danger, or pain, they would have
instinctively and even beseechingly called out His name.
When the papers were exhausted, the conversation of the Palmers became
more steady and personal.
“Guess you’re goin’ out to-night with that Jew-kike uh yours,” said
Harry, trying to get a rise out of Blanche. “Can’t you pick out
somethin’ better than a Christ-killer, huh?”
“What’s it to you?” she asked, coolly. “Show you a good-looking Jewish
girl and you’ll fall all over yourself trying to date her up. I know
you.”
“Sure, but I’d just play her for what I could get,” answered Harry.
“I’ve got a notion you’re kinda sweet on that Loo-ee Rosenberg, ’r
whatever his name is.”
“Well, she’d better not be,” said the father, with a scowl. “I don’t
mind when some kike takes her out for a good time--their jack’s as good
as any other guy’s--but I’m not lettin’ any Jews get into this family.”
Blanche gave them a scornful smile. She was far from being in love with
Rosenberg, and the matter was neither pressing nor irritating, but she
felt a general defiance against their masculine habit of laying down
the law to women.
“I guess I’m old enough to tend my own business, pa,” she said.
“Oh, you are, huh,” answered her father. “Well, maybe we’ll see about
that.”
“Aw, I know what’s eating both of you,” said Mabel, in her
expressionless, thinly liquid voice. “You’re sore ’cause Harry lost to
a Jew in that fight he had up in Harlem. Kid Goldman, that’s the one.
When you going to beat him up, Harry?”
“I’ll get him, I’ll get him, don’t worry,” her brother answered,
frowning as he remembered the affront to his vanity. “I was outa
condition that night, and my left wasn’t workin’ good, that’s all.
Wait’ll I get him in the ring again.”
“You know what I’ve always told you--you got the makin’s of a champion
’f you’ll only get down to business,” said his father. “You’re trailin’
around too much with that bootleggin’ gang uh yours. No fighter ever
got to the top with a bottle in his hand, I’m tellin’ you.”
“G’wan, you know damn well I’m down to the gym five days a week,”
answered Harry, who realized the truth of his father’s words, but
wanted to minimize it with his own reply. “An’ what’s more, I don’t see
any of you turnin’ down that fifty they slip me ev’ry Monday. Money
don’t lay around on the street--you got to get it any place you can.”
“Well, I ain’t any too anxious ’bout hearin’ the cops knockin’ on this
door some day,” his father responded, peevishly.
“Go ahead, drink your fool self to death--who cares,” said Mabel, who
had become petulant at the thought of the grand style in which they
could all live if her brother would only rise to the head of his class.
“You’ve got plenty of muscle but no sense, that’s the trouble with you.”
“Say, how many times ’ve you seen me drunk, how many?” Harry asked,
beginning to be angry at this exposure of his weakest trait. “Ev’ry one
in this joint’s always lappin’ up all I bring home, an’ I never touch
it myself. ’F I do go on a jag once’n a while it’s my business. You
can’t get up in the fight game unless you’re on the inside--there’s too
many big crooks higher up fixin’ things.”
“I don’t believe it--you’re just looking for a way out,” said Blanche,
to whom Harry was a generous but conceited brother--a strong, vicious
baby who imagined himself to be a model of shrewdness. At the bottom
she disliked his bulldozing, prying ways, but her dislike was not yet
strong enough to overcome the more enforced feelings of gratitude and
blood-ties within her heart. Harry always suspected that Blanche was
the one member of his family not impressed by his prowess and his
knowledge of the world, and he never gave up his efforts to increase
her respect, with all the argument and repartee at his command.
“I am, huh,” he said, answering her last remark. “What do you know
about it? I suppose you get all that info’ uh yours punchin’ the cash
register down at the cafeteria. The only way you’re wise is with your
mouth. That middle-weight champ fight down at the Terrace was fixed up
a week ago and I’ve got it straight. Just watch the papers tuhmorrow
night.”
“Aw, I’ve heard a lotta roomors goin’ around, but that’s hot air,”
said his father. “Garvey’d be a damn fool to sell his title for any
amount--I don’t care ’fit’s one hundred thousan’. He ain’t had it a
year yet, an’ there’s plenty uh holes left in the meal-ticket.”
“Listen to somethin’, will yuh,” answered Harry, who really knew what
he was talking about in this matter. “Garvey’s gonna give up the title
now and then win it back in a return bout. Lose it on a foul an’ raise
a big holler--that’s the scheme. Young Anderson’ll keep it f’r a year
’r so, an’ make a pile of dough cleanin’ up all the suckers in the
sticks. With the movie stuff an’ the easy pickin’s he’ll rake in three
times ’s much as his manager give Garvey’s tuh fix it all up. I got it
from a guy who was there when they all talked it over, only I can’t say
his name ’cause I’d get my bean drilled through ’f they ever found out
I told.”
“Are you kiddin’ me?” demanded his father.
“I hope to croak if I am!”
“Oh, boy, watch me put thirty dollars on that fight,” cried Philip, who
had been sitting beside his father and listening avidly.
“Well, go slow, go slow,” advised his father. “I know Harry wouldn’t
give us a bum stir, but them agreements ’r’ often bungled up ’r
double-crossed at the last minnit.”
The men began a discussion of prize-fighting conditions in general,
with much vehemence and a comical contrast of naive and foxy opinions,
and the two girls brought out manicure-sets of flashy celluloid,
and fiddled with their nails. Something that was not depression but
unobtrusively akin to it, stirred inside of Blanche. She had felt it
at times before and had never been able to fathom it beyond her sense
that life was too underhanded, and that she didn’t like this aspect of
it. As she listened to the men, with their endless recitals of frauds
and machinations, the little weight moved within her breast. Fake,
fake, fake--that was all you ever heard. Wasn’t there anything honest
and good in the world? It sure didn’t look like there was, most of the
time. Oh, well, why bother so much about it? You could never get along
in this world unless you “belonged”--unless you were like the things
around you.
She started to think of Louis Rosenberg, the man with whom she had an
engagement for the coming night. She didn’t love him, sure not, but
he wasn’t a bad fellow at that. He seemed to be an honest boy, and
sometimes he talked about big, fancy things, like why people hated
each other so much, and why the world wasn’t better than it was, and
he used a word now and then that he called art--something that made
people write books and do paintings and statuary, and get wild over
nothing that any one else could see. He certainly was different from
most men all right. He kissed her sometimes, but he never tried to “get
fresh” (getting fresh, to Blanche, was the placing of a man’s hands
upon any covered part of her body except the arms). Maybe that was why
she didn’t love him. He was too darn good, and a girl wanted a fellow
to “try something” now and then, if he was slow about it and didn’t act
as though he expected her to fall for him (respond to him) immediately.
Then, when he did try it, she could tell just how much she cared for
him, and she repulsed him, or accepted him to some extent, according
to how nervous and glad he made her feel. Well, anyway, there were
always enough men who tried to make advances to her, and Rosenberg was
something of a relief.
She met him that night on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second
Street, where the theater lights clustered like bits of a soul burning
in oil, and an endless, crawling stream of automobiles and taxicabs hid
the pavement, and where the tall, rectangular buildings and the suavely
gaudy shops seemed to be the only unexcited and unsensual objects of
the scene. Rosenberg scarcely ever called for her at the apartment,
and when he did he waited outside on the stoop, because Blanche felt
that she would be “mortified to death” if her father and her brothers
should choose to act unfriendly toward him, and she didn’t want to
run the risk of such an occurrence. She was wearing a very thin,
short-sleeved, georgette dress that extended only two inches below
her knees and was of dull white with a dark red flower-pattern, and
semi-transparent, flesh-colored stockings, and brown shoes with high
heels, and a black felt hat shaped like an upside-down cup, with a red
bow at the side. Like many girls in her environment, she dressed with a
combination of unconscious artistry and cheap, over-flashy display.
Rosenberg was a youth of twenty-three, who worked at the receiving desk
in one of the Public Library branches, and was beginning to think a bit
too much for his happiness, prodded by the “higher literature” that
he was reading for the first time. Previous to his Library job he had
worked as a shoe salesman and had given it up because he had failed
to see that he was “getting anywhere” and because he wanted to do
something out of the ordinary but didn’t know quite what it should be.
He lived with a family of brothers and sisters, and they, together with
his parents, regarded him as a pleasant “schlemiel,” who was always
talking about things but never accomplishing anything, though they were
willing to let him alone as long as he worked and supported himself.
He had met Blanche at the cafeteria where she worked as a cashier on
weekdays, through the expedient of opening a gradual conversation with
her as he paid his check each noon. Finally he had grown bold enough
to ask if he could “take her out” and she had assented because she had
liked the diffident style in which his request was worded.
He was tall and narrow-shouldered, but he was wiry and his arms were
not unmuscular. His light brown face, with its hooked nose, dark,
large-lidded eyes, and thin mouth, often had the look of a puzzled
dreamer, bowing to practical barriers but still trying, half-heartedly,
to peer beyond them. In his attire he wavered between negligence and
neatness, his tastes running to dark suits and loose collars and
brightly striped shirts, and his leading vanity was his wavy black
hair, which he often combed for ten minutes at a stretch.
Since the hour was only eight o’clock--still too early for them to
visit the lower Broadway dance-hall which they frequented--Blanche
and Rosenberg walked over to Bryant Park and sat on one of the
wooden-iron benches along the cement walk and looking out on the
orderly, clipped levels of grass. The late spring night, with its
warm air that had the barest threat of coolness in it, and its
cloudless sky dotted with stars and a moon at which you could glance
now and then with the feeling that they were pretty and a bit
mystifying, and the more immediate lights around you, with their
warm, come-on-and-see-what’s-under-me winks, and all the sounds of
pleasure-seeking traffic--these things brought Blanche a light-hearted,
knowing mood. She was a girl, young and rather handsome, and there was
nothing that she couldn’t make men do if she had only cared enough
about it.
“Tell you what we’ll do, Lou, we’ll take that ferry ride over to Staten
Island,” she said. “I love to get out on the water when it’s night.”
“Let’s not and say we did,” he answered, moodily.
“Gee, I never saw a fellow like you,” she replied. “Dance, dance,
that’s all you care about. Here I know you’re short on money, and
here I’m giving you a chance to get away with forty cents for the
night--four thin dimes--and you turn it down.”
“Don’t always rub in how poor I am,” he said, nettled. “’F I was so
darn crazy about money, like other guys are, I’d get it all right.
There’s other things I’m interested in--books, and good plays, and
watching what other people do. They all call me lazy at home, but it
don’t bother me any. I don’t see that they get so much out of life by
working their heads off all the time.”
Blanche felt a little scornful and a little inquiring as she listened
to him. Who ever heard of saying that people shouldn’t work--what would
become of them if they didn’t? Besides, what did he get out of all his
reading and this “think-ing” of his? He was a boob in many respects,
and in a way she was wasting her time with him. She could have been in
the company of men who could show her an actual good time--high-class
cabarets and automobile parties, and the best theaters and restaurants.
Yet, after she went out with these men for a while she always grew
tired of them. They all got down to what they wanted from her, and
it became a bald question of taking or rejecting them--you couldn’t
“string them along” forever--and they all lacked something that she
was unable to put her finger on--something “classy” and aboveboard and
decent without being goody-goodish. When she “let them go too far,”
under the hilarious urge of liquor, she never felt quite right about
it afterwards. She could never rid herself of the feeling that the
man had not deserved what he had received and that she had been just
another girl on his list. Rosenberg was the one man who came nearest
to fulfilling this mysterious lack, but he was deficient in all of the
other requisites, and his physical appeal was weak to her.
“Well, you don’t read a book when you dance, do you?” she asked at
last, desiring to take a mild jab at him. “Gee, but you’re the cat’s
something. I wish you had more get-up about you.”
“Yeh, it’s too bad I haven’t got a roll,” he answered. “Sometimes I
b’lieve that’s all you girls think about.”
An anger mounted within her.
“Say, ’f I did, why’d I have to pick you out?” she asked. “You make me
sick and tired!”
“Aw, don’t get so sore,” he replied. “I’m touchy in one spot, that’s
all. Let’s talk about something else. I was reading a book called First
Street the other day--it’s highbrow, you know, but it’s darn popular,
too. I hear they’ve sold a hundred thousand. It tells all about how
gossipy-like and narrow-minded and, oh, just small, people are--the
people that live in those little burgs.... Say, the more I find out
about this world of ours the less I like it. Why the devil can’t
people leave each other alone, and do what they want, long’s they’re
not hurting anybody.”
His last words made Blanche sympathize with him, in spite of the fact
that, to her, there was an unmanly element in what he said. Real men,
now, went out and fought with each other, and “stood the gaff” and “got
what was coming to them” and made people obey them. Still there was too
darn much bossing in the world, with ev’rybody sticking his finger in
the other person’s pie. Her family was always nagging at her, and the
owner of the cafeteria was always telling her what to do--thought he
owned her for his measly twenty-two a week--and the cop on the corner
gave you a rotten look if he saw you walking alone late at night ...
yes, too darn much bossing to suit her.
“What’s that there word, narruh-mindud, ’r something like that--what’s
it mean?” she asked.
“It means when you don’t see nothing except what’s right in front of
your eyes,” he answered, delighted at the chance to show his wisdom.
“That’s what ails most of us, all right. When you’re narrow-minded, you
see, you want everybody to be like you are and you go right up in the
air when people don’t act the way you do. That’s what it means.”
“But you’ve got to be like other people ’r else you’ll never get
anywheres,” she said, uncertainly.
“Well, yes, in lots of things,” he answered, “but just the same you
can’t be arrested for what’s going on in your head. You c’n have all
the ideas you want to, ’s long as you don’t pull off any crime, ’r
bother anybody.”
She liked the queerness of his words, for no discernible reason other
than that he seemed to be in favor of “standing up for yourself,”
and not always believing what people told you. Not so bad at that,
only--try--and--do--it! Oh, well, what did all this have to do with the
night ahead of them? This funny boy was her escort for the night, and
she was a desirable woman, and she wished that he would “cut out” all
of the heavy stuff and make love to her, or pay her some compliments,
or do something that men did when they were “gone” on a girl.
“Say, you never kill yourself paying any attention to _me_,” she said,
after a pause. “It’s always them i-i-deeuhs uh yours. Why, I know piles
uh men that would jump all over themselves just for the chance to sit
’longside uh me here.”
He had been looking away from her, and now he turned his head, stung,
and sorrowfully hungry, and much more upset than he dared to confess
to himself, as he took in the appetizing, fresh sauciness of her
face, and the suggestive witchcraft of her pent-up breast. There was
a come-and-get-me-if-you’re-able, and an almost smiling expression
on her face. Without realizing it, he always made an additional
effort to talk about “deep things” when he was with her, to escape
from the unsteadying influence which she had upon his emotions. The
other girls whom he occasionally took to moving-picture theaters and
dances, were more or less inviting to him according to the shape of
their faces--he was fond of very plump cheeks and lips with a large
fullness to them--and whether they had ample but not too corpulent
forms--but otherwise he did not differentiate them, except in the
light of whether they were “good kidders” (brightly loquacious about
nothing in particular) or unduly silent and tiresome. Blanche, however,
incited within him a quick-rhythmed trouble and respect which he could
not explain, outside of his desire to embrace her. She never seemed to
have much “brains,” but still he felt that there was something to her
that life hadn’t given her a chance to develop--something honest and
undismayed.
He had no actual ability at clear thinking, in spite of all of his poor
little defiances and boldnesses abstracted from this book and that,
but he did have a questioning, dissatisfied spirit--a spirit prone to
quick melancholies and even quicker hopes, and always trying to “find
out what it all meant.” He had the desire to make Blanche worthy of
him, and to give her the knowledges and bystandish rebukes toward life
on which he prided himself. He told himself that he was an idealist
in sexual matters and that he was waiting for a girl who could show
him a clean, aspiring, beautiful love, free from all coquetries and
hagglings, and he used the impressive adjectives to serenade his sense
of sexual frustration. In reality, he was oversexed, and not bold
enough to capture the girls whom he secretly desired, but that was not
the whole of it--far beneath him he really did long for a physical
outlet that would be much less sordid and common than the ones within
his reach. At rare intervals he would visit some professional woman,
whose card had been given to him by one of his more rakish friends, and
go away from her with a relieved but downcast mood.
While he felt that he was in love with Blanche, he didn’t want to be
too quick about telling her--you had to wait and be sure that some
other girl, even more alluring, wouldn’t come along--and since she
didn’t seem to be in love with him, his pride made him silent at the
thought of a probable rejection. Often, when he kissed her good-night,
his longing to “go farther” would be close to overpowering him, but at
this moment she always slipped efficiently out of his arms and said her
last farewell. To Blanche, kisses of any length were equivalents to
saying “yes.”
As Rosenberg sat beside Blanche now, after her girlishly taunting
words, he lost control of himself for the first time, and his hand
dropped tightly on one of her knees, but she rose instantly from the
bench. She wasn’t angry at his having become “fresh” because she blamed
herself for it, but at the same time she didn’t want to encourage him.
He was a nice enough kid, but somehow when he touched her she didn’t
get any “kick” out of it.
“Not here, Lou--c’mon, let’s go,” she said, trying to put a look of
cajoling promise on her face.
They walked over to “Dreamland,” the place where they usually danced.
It was a moderately large hall, where the admission price was only
two dollars for couples, and it catered to a nondescript array of
patrons. Those who attended it regularly were in the main young blades
with small salaries and gay ambitions, and working-girls who desired
to “step out” at night, but you could spy a variety of other people
who dropped in occasionally. The place hired twelve professional
girl dancers, who sat on a row of green wicker chairs and waited for
customers, and there was a booth wherein a lady, who looked like a
middle-aged, superannuated burlesque actress, dispensed tickets, each
of which entitled the bearer to a dance with one of the hired girls.
Three or four professional male dancers in tuxedoes lolled opposite
the girls and waited for feminine patrons. They were mostly in demand
for the tango and the Charleston--more intricate dances which most
of the other men present had not mastered. Prosperous, middle-aged
business men frequently dropped in to dance with the girl “hostesses”
and a buxom, overripe, overdressed, smirking woman--who supervised this
part of the hall’s activities--went through the respectable farce of
inquiring each gentleman’s name and introducing him to his “hostess”
partner. Many youths, “hard up” for the evening and desiring an
excellent and “swell-looking” dancer, and many out-of-town visitors,
pining for deviltry during the vacation from their families, were also
frequent patrons. In addition, a large number of unattached men drifted
about the hall and solicited dances from single girls, who accepted or
rejected them according to whether they were well-dressed and talked
with the proper confident, wise-cracking inflections. The dance floor
covered almost one-half of the hall’s space and was separated by a
wooden railing from the remainder of the place.
With its bright green wicker armchairs, and floor of dark red plush,
and varicolored electric lights hanging in bunches from the ceiling,
and badly done paintings of women and cherubs and flowers on the
surface of the walls, and canopied, bedecked platform at one side of
the dance floor, where eight jazz players performed, the hall gave you
the general effect of spurious romance putting on its best front to
hide the decay of its heart. The aura of respectability that hung over
the place was an amusing and desperate deception. Two guards stood on
the dance floor and reprimanded couples when they shimmied, or moved
with a too undulating slowness, and other attendants watched the rows
of wicker chairs and censored any open “spooning” among the patrons,
and yet the hall was quite patently an inception-ground for rendezvous,
and assignations, and flirtations, and covert flesh-pressures. The
“hostesses” took soft drinks with their steadiest partners, at one
end of the hall, with much touching of knees and flitting of hands
under the tables, to induce the men to spend more freely--overrouged
and lip-sticked girls, with bobbed hair and plump faces where sex had
become the most automatic and shallow of signals. They wore short
evening gowns, sleeveless and with low necks, and they “innocently”
crossed their legs to show an inch or two of bare flesh above their
rolled-up, thinnest stockings, and then uncrossed them again when they
perceived that some man was staring at the exposure, keeping up these
back-and-forth movements as though an innuendo with springs and wheels
had replaced all of the sexual spontaneity within them.
Blanche and Rosenberg danced again and again to the jerky, moaning,
truculently snickering ache and dementia of the music. To Blanche,
dancing was the approved, indirect way in which you could relieve your
sex without compromising it, and as she was hugged tightly against
Rosenberg, he became desirable to her because the music and steps
transformed him and cast a rhythmical glamor upon his body. She had the
same feeling with any man with whom she danced, unless he was old or
inept, and when she danced with a man who was physically attractive off
the dance floor as well, the sensation rose to an all-conquering and
haughty semiecstasy. Then she held her head high, and closed her eyes
occasionally, and wished that darkness would suddenly descend on the
floor.
After their first few dances, Blanche and Rosenberg sat down,
breathless, and without a thought in their heads. To Rosenberg,
dances were opportunities to embrace a girl without interference or
remonstrance, but beyond that the music made him feel that he was
capering on the divine top of the world, where such dull and mournful
things as jobs, and money worries, and alarm clocks, and family
quarrels had been deliciously left behind.
In front of Blanche, a bulky, short man, in a dark suit with the latest
wide-bottomed trousers, was trying “to make” a dark, barely smiling
girl, slender and dressed in a clinging gray gown, who refused to
answer his remarks.
“Gee, I’m as popular around here as the German measles,” he said loudly.
The girl smiled more apparently but failed to answer him.
“Listen, just try me once,” he begged. “Just one dance. I’ll pay the
doctor bills if I make you sick. I’m a good sport.”
The girl smiled more widely but still remained silent.
“Will somebody tell me why I’m living?” he queried to the air above her
head. “Boy, but it’s cold to-night! I left the old automatic at home so
I can’t die just yet, girlie. Come on, just one dance, will you?”
By this time the girl was fully convinced of his glib-tongued,
regular-guy status, and felt that he had implored enough to serve as
a sufficient payment for his dance. She rose, without a word, and
accompanied him to the floor. Similar episodes were being enacted
around Blanche and Rosenberg, and he said, with a grin: “It sure gets
me when I listen to what you girls fall for. That’s why I lose out--I
hate to talk that kind of line.”
“Oh, go on, you’d do it if you could,” answered Blanche. “A girl always
likes a fellow ’f he knows how to be funny and don’t carry it too far.
You know what I mean. I never was so crazy ’bout this kidding stuff
myself, but then maybe that’s why you like me, isn’t it, Lou?”
“You’ve got something in you, all right,” he replied. “You don’t know
so much more’n other girls, but you make me feel that you’re diff’rent,
anyway. I guess it’s because you don’t put up so much bluffing and
leading a fellow on, like other girls do.”
She laughed to hide her pleasure at the compliment, and because another
part of her said inaudibly: “Oh, I don’t, eh? Well, I’ll show you,
before I’m through!”
“You’re a funny fellow, but I’ve met them worse than you,” she said.
They danced until 1 A.M., after which he escorted her to the apartment.
As they stood in the musty, narrow, dimly lit hallway, an emotion like
a Roman-candle spun around in his breast, and for the first time he
grasped her with rough, active hands, and breathed hard as he whispered
short, incoherent pleadings. She pushed him back with an undeniable
anger and force which made him grow still and dismayed, and they stood
for a moment, looking at each other.
“So, you’re like all the rest of ’em,” she said. “What do you think I
am? You’ve got your nerve, you have. You can’t put your hands on me
that way, and don’t forget it!”
“Well, I’m sorry,” he answered, downcast. “I didn’t mean to act like
that, but something got the better of me. I couldn’t think of anything
except I wanted you. I’m in love with you, Blanche, and I guess I
didn’t know it till just now. I’d ask you to marry me to-morrow ’f I
had money enough to keep us going.”
She softened at this switch to a “decent” proposal, and she reproached
herself for having flirted too much with him without loving him or
caring a great deal for his embraces. She liked to hear him talk, but
when he touched her he was awkward and hasty, and without that winning
blend of confidence and gradual boldness which she liked in a man’s
approaches.
“I s’pose it’s my fault, too,” she said. “I don’t love you, Lou, but
I do like you lots. Maybe I will some time. How c’n any girl be sure
about that? I don’ want to stop going with you ’f you’ll just try to be
friends with me, Lou.”
He stood for a moment without answering--discouraged and resentful.
Somehow he never seemed to get anything that he really wanted--what
was the use of it all. She li-iked the way he talked, oh, yes, but
she preferred to save herself for some empty-pated cake-eater, some
know-it-all fellow with a straight nose and a bunch of bum jokes and a
string of promises about what he was going to do for her.
“Oh, I’ll try,” he said at last, “but I can’t see why you don’t care
for me. I’ve got just as good a head as any one else you know, and I’m
not so terrible looking, and I know you wouldn’t turn me down just
’cause I’m poor.”
“I cert’nly wouldn’t,” she replied. “I can’t tell you why I don’t love
you--it’s just not there, that’s all. I think you’re a nice boy, really
I do, and I want to keep seeing you, but what’s the use of letting you
do things to me when it don’t mean nothing?... I’ve got to go upstairs
now--I feel like I could sleep ten hours. We sure did dance a lot
to-night. Listen, call me up next Thursday noon, at the caf’, and
we’ll go some place Thursday night.”
“All right, I’ll give you a ring,” he answered, dully. “I guess you
can’t help how you feel, Blanche.”
He kissed her good-night, and she let his lips stay for a while, out
of pity, and then broke away from him. As she went to bed, she had a
muddled, wondering feeling--why did she always turn down boys that
were “good” and willing to marry her, and why didn’t she object to the
embraces of “bad” men, who were just looking for an easy prospect?
Maybe she was a little “bad” herself--a little like May Harrigan, whose
name was the jest of the neighborhood, and who grabbed any young fellow
that came along.... Her perturbations faded out into sleep.
On the next morning she was still a bit glum at the cafeteria, but it
was no more than the least of shadows as she exchanged glances and
repartee with various customers who paid their checks. When she sat
before the cash register, her business-like tension extended even to
the sexual side of her, and she uttered her set phrases merely to
dispose of the men who talked to her, and with little interest in their
faces and words. During the lull-hours, however, between two and four
in the afternoon, she relaxed, and the appraising tingles of her sex
came back, and she entered into badinage with the proprietor and the
counter-men and stray customers whom she knew. Her confined perch on
the cashier’s stool had to be forgotten in some way.
The cafeteria had rows of brightly varnished chairs with broad arms,
and tables with white, enameled tops, and a sprinkle of sawdust on the
tiled floor. Pyramids of oranges and grapefruit stood in the windows,
and the glass-walled food counters were heaped with pastry, cold meats
and trays of salads and puddings. The smell of soggy, overspiced food
and body-odors possessed the air, and a spirit of dreamless, hasty,
semidirty devouring hung over the place. On this afternoon, Blanche was
chatting with the proprietor, a tall Jew of forty years, with a jowled,
bloodless face, killed black eyes that were always shifting about in
the fear that they might be missing something, and the thickest of
lips. His coat was off and he wore an expensive, monogramed silk shirt
of green and white stripes, and had a cigar forever in his mouth or
hand.
“Check up yet on the accounts?” he asked.
“Yep, ev’rything’s straight,” she answered.
“Say, I bought a beauty of uh coat f’r my wiff yesterday,” he said.
“She can’t say I ever hold out on _her_.”
“Well, isn’t that nice--she must be tickled to death,” said Blanche,
giving him the flattering words that he wanted to hear. “Nobody ever
slips me any swell coats.”
“Well, if they don’t it’s your fault,” he replied. “You could work a
fellow f’r anything you wanted--you’ve got the goods, all right.”
“Aw, quit your kidding,” she said. “I wouldn’t take no prizes in a
beauty show.”
“You would if I was one uh the judges,” he answered.
He poked her in the side, playfully, and she smiled carefully. You had
to take such things from your boss--it was all in the game--but you
wished that he would keep his hands to himself--the fat old lobster.
“Any time you wanna take a little ride in my machine, it’s there,” he
said.
“Gee, I’d be afraid of you,” she retorted. “I think you’re _some_
devil, you are.”
He chuckled at the praise of his masculine gifts, and walked back to
the kitchen in response to a call. The cafeteria was located in a
manufacturing and wholesale district where practically all of the trade
occurred around the noon hour, and it closed its doors at 6 P.M. When
Blanche returned to the apartment, Harry, Philip and Mabel were sitting
at the supper-table (the father happened to be visiting one of his
cronies uptown).
“Say, I met a guy to-day said he saw you at Dreamland las’ night,” said
Philip, when Blanche came to the table.
“Uh-huh, I was there,” said Blanche.
“Well, I wouldn’t be seen in a bum joint like that,” Mabel commented.
“You certainly have a gift f’r pickin’ out the penny-squeezers, Blanie.
Me f’r the Club Breauville, ’r places like that. They put on the best
show you ever saw--Hawkins ’n Dale, straight from the Palace Theater,
and a big, A-number-one chorus.”
“Aw, rats, you’re always worrying what a fella’s going to spend on
you,” said Blanche. “They’ve got a peach of a jazz-band at Dreamland,
and a dandy floor--that’s all I care about.”
“Your tastes ’r sim-ply aw-ful,” Mabel answered, “and what’s more, why
shouldn’t a girl go with high-class fellas and have ’em spend piles on
her? That’s what they’re made for.”
“Well, I don’t blame you none,” said Philip, “but believe me, I’d never
pick out a wife like you. You sure would keep a fella on the go digging
it up for you.”
“Mabel don’t mean anything by it,” said his mother, who had come in
from the kitchen, “but I wish she wouldn’t stay out so late. I get to
worryin’ when she comes home three an’ four an’ five in the mornin’.
You never can tell what’ll happen to a girl in this city.”
“Aw, ma, don’t fret, I can take care of myself,” Mabel said.
“That’s what they all say,” Harry broke in. “I was talkin’ to a fella
to-day, said his kid sister got into a scrape out in Jersey. Two guys
started scrappin’ over her in a machine, and one of ’em’s dyin’ in the
hospital, and the bulls ’r after her. It was in the papers yesterday.
You better watch y’r step, Mabe.”
“Listen, no girl ’cept a fool would go out in a machine with two guys,”
answered Mabel. “I’ll take ’em one at a time, believe me.”
“Well, I do think you’re too free with the men, an’ you only eighteen,”
her mother said, looking at Mabel in a ruefully helpless way. “It’s I
that can’t hold you down, and it’s I that never could, but I’m wishin’
you’d stay home once’n a while. How’ll you ever get a decint man to
make a decint proposal to you, how’ll you ever, runnin’ round with that
fast crowd uh yours?”
“G’wan, she’ll land a big one yet, ’fore she’s through,” said Harry.
“Mabe’s a wise girlie, and I’m with her all the time!”
“Same here,” Mabel answered affectionately, as she pulled her brother’s
hair.
“I s’pose I’m the boob uh this fam’ly,” said Blanche, “but I won’t lose
no sleep over it. ’F I like the way a man talks, ’n how he looks, I
don’t care what’s the size of his roll.”
“You got it from me, you did,” her mother said, with a dully soft look.
“It’s I that married your father when he hadn’t a cent to his name.
’Twas the way he could blarney, ’twas that, and ’twas the face of him
that made me take him.”
“Aw, pa’s all right, but he’s shy on brains,” Mabel said. “’F I ever
get hooked up with any man he’s got to have plenty uh money, and then
some. I’m worth all the dough in the world ’cordin’ to my way uh
thinkin’, and I’m not scrubbin’ floors for no fella this year ’r next.
This lovin’-up stuff don’t get you much.”
“Yeh, Blanche is a mut with alla her Rosinburgs, ’n Kellies, ’n all the
rest uh them tin-horn pikers,” said Harry. “I know how she’ll wind up,
all right. Some guy’ll have her washin’ his clothes an makin’ her like
it!”
“Ma’s been washing yours and pa’s for years, but you’re not kicking
about that,” answered Blanche. “Anyway it won’t be some one like you.
You think that row-mance is something people clean their shoes with,
you do. You’ve got a heart like a oyster, I’ll say.”
“Row-ma-ance, that’s good,” answered Harry, derisively. “Try an’ cash
in on it at the butcher shop an’ see what you get.”
“Well, I’m on Blanie’s side,” said Philip, who liked his older sister
because she was “softer” than the other members of the family. “When I
marry a girl she’s got to love me, first, last, ’n’ all the time. I’m
strong for the jack, sure, but there’s other things hanging around.”
“Say, isn’t Joe Campbell comin’ up to-night?” asked Mabel, turning to
Blanche.
“Yeh, I’ve got a date with him f’r eight-thirty.”
“Now there’s a guy you oughta play up to,” said Harry. “He takes down a
good three hundred a week f’r that turn he does up at The Golden Mill.
Joe’s as wise as they make ’em--a wise-crackin’ baby. I’m gonna stick
around when he comes up here to-night. He c’n get a laugh outa me any
day in the year.”
“Joe’s there, all right,” Mabel said. “I wish he wasn’t so sweet on
Blanche.”
“Well, go after him, dearie, if that’s how you feel,” Blanche answered.
“It won’t be breaking my heart.”
As she dressed herself for the coming engagement, Blanche had
an uneven, up-in-the-air song in her blood. Another man would
soon be courting her, and casting “I’d-like-to-get-you” looks at
her, and deferring to her just as much as if she had been famous
or wealthy, and praising her to lead up to attempted caresses,
while she sat in judgment on the proceedings, with a queenly
“I’ll-have-to-see-about-this” sensation, and remarks made of “slams”
and retirings to put him on his mettle, and the feeling of owning the
world for a few, high-keyed hours, until she returned to her bed and
the more level-headed endurance-test at the cafeteria. Her head was
totally empty for a time, and she sang the popular tunes of the day,
in a low, contralto voice, as she fussed about with her toilette.
Then glimpses of Joe Campbell appeared in her head, and she wondered
whether she would ever marry him. She liked him physically, and she
respected his money-making talents, but her response toward him was
much stronger when he was with her. His absence seemed to remove a
black-art spell, and to leave in its place doubts and confusions.
Then, beneath all of his good-humors and effulgent generosities, she
divined an insincerity and something that spoke of shrouded, patiently
crouching intentions. What they were she did not know. Her mind was not
capable of delving into this reaction, and it told her only that he
wasn’t “coming out” with his real self. Her brother had introduced him
to her six months previous to this night, and since then Campbell had
pursued her in an irregular way, since he frequently left New York on
vaudeville-bookings. She had allowed him certain physical liberties and
had admonished herself afterwards for being “too easy,” but the matter
had rested there, since he had never been remarkably insistent in his
efforts to vanquish her.
When he came up, and airily saluted her, Harry and Mabel, who were in
the living-room, greeted him effusively. They considered it an honor
that this minor Broadway favorite, whose name was occasionally in
electric lights, should be so willing to visit them and “step out of
his class.”
“’Lo, Joe, still bringin’ down the house?” asked Mabel.
“Nothing but,” he replied. “The bulls came running into the place last
night, looking for a free-for-all fight, the clapping was that loud.”
Mabel and Harry laughed, and Harry said: “C’mon, I bet you coulda heard
a maxim-silencer after you got through.”
“That’s the same gun they shoot off when you get through fighting,
isn’t it?” asked Campbell, with a solemn look.
“You win,” answered Harry, laughing again.
“Well, I’ve got to go now,” Mabel said. “Papa doesn’t like to be kept
waitin’, you know.”
“Be sure and don’t leave him anything,” Campbell replied. “A girl got
expelled from the Flappers’ Union the other day--they all got sore at
her because she overlooked a ten-spot in the upper vest-pocket.”
“You’re talkin’ to the president of the Union--don’t be funny,”
answered Mabel.
Blanche joined in the laughter now and then--Campbell’s humor was
hard to resist. A stocky man of medium height, whose feet were always
tapping the floor as though they had a light itch to be dancing, he
rarely ever departed from the bon-mots that constituted his chief
stock-in-trade. His mind was intelligent in worldly ways, and a blank
otherwise, but he was quite aware of his ignorances and careful not to
expose them. He had a long, narrow face, with a slanting nose, mobile
lips, and a twinkling, lazy cruelty in his eyes. His thick brown hair
was burnished and pasted down on his head, and he wore the latest,
loose-trousered clothes, in shades of gray and brown, with multicolored
scarves, and a diamond ring on one of his fingers. He was a coarse
sensualist grown careless from many feminine captures, and he had held
back in Blanche’s regard from the feeling that she would “have to come
to him first.” Still, he was becoming aware of an increasing urge
toward her, moved by something in her face and figure that “hit it off
just right.” She wasn’t nearly as pretty as tens of Broadway girls whom
he knew, but she had an unspoiled swerve and sturdiness that attracted
him, and in addition, he felt that she knew much more than many other
women of his acquaintance--that she was not quite as shallow, or as
palpably scheming, as most of his retinue were.
He left the apartment with her, and they hailed a taxicab and were
driven to his cabaret off Upper Broadway. His turn only came on at
eleven o’clock when the after-theater crowd poured into the place, and
he sat with Blanche at one of the tables, and endlessly greeted his
“friends,” and adulterated glasses of ginger-ale with the contents of a
silver flask carried in his hip-pocket.
The Golden Mill was a resplendent, baroque cabaret, with a large,
electrically lit windmill, made of gold silk stretched over a
framework, standing over the stage. The jazz-band sat just below the
stage, between the carpeted runways on which the performers descended
to the dance floor. Men and women, half of them in evening clothes,
chattered and laughed at the surrounding tables, with a macabre
heartiness that sometimes lessened to betrayals of the underlying
dullness.
The whisky began to knock about in Blanche’s heart to a cruelly
victorious feeling--Campbell thought he was so darn smart, didn’t he?
Well, he’d have to go some to get her, just the same. Girls were always
falling for a celebrity of his kind, and she’d treat him to a novelty.
Still, he made her laugh and forget the rest of her world, and she
didn’t mind if he caressed her to a certain extent (not too much and
not too little).
“Y’know, you’re a royal-flush to me,” said Campbell. “I’d win the pot
with you, any day in the year.”
“You’ll win the air ’f you get too gay,” she answered, merrily.
“Now is that nice?” he queried, in tones of mock-reproach. “Daddy’ll do
anything for you--anything you want.”
“I’m not taking things from men this year,” she replied.
“Isn’t she smart--keeps count of the years ’n’ everything,” he said.
“You’ll stop counting when you get to be thirty, old dear.”
“Is that the place where you stopped?” she asked.
Campbell winced secretly--he was thirty-five and not particularly
elated about it. Blanche always talked better under the influence of
liquor--it loosened her tongue and unearthed an effervescence in her
mind: keen as far as it went.
“Take that knife away, Annette;--it’s killing me,” he responded, in
quavering, melodramatic tones.
Blanche took another sip from her highball.
“D’y’know, I may get crazy some time and ask you to marry me,” he said.
“That’s too bad--it must be worrying you a lot,” answered Blanche. “I
never lose my head that way, so look out.”
“But really, I’m strong for you,” he went on. “It’s all in fun most of
the time with me, but you’re at the top of the list.”
“I’d hate to bet on your meaning it,” said Blanche, a bit more softly.
“Don’t do it, you couldn’t get any odds,” he answered.
He chucked her under the chin and she slapped his hand.
“What nervous ha-ands you’ve got,” she said.
“Come on, act as though you didn’t like it,” he retorted.
“That’s the best thing I do,” she replied.
They continued the bantering, with the occasional interruption of
a fox-trot, until his “turn” came on, when he left her with an
acquaintance of his--a harmless, hero-worshiping chorus man in a dark
suit, whose ruddy, regular-featured face had a look that was perilously
near to a pout. Then Campbell appeared in white duck trousers, a dark
blue coat, black shoes, and a panama-straw hat, and did clog-dances,
and sang in a hard tenor voice, at the head of a bare-legged chorus
dressed in very short boyish trousers of red, and indigo low-necked
vests, and gaudy caps slanting on their heads. He was a nimble dancer
and had a powerful voice, and could have risen to a point near the head
of his profession, if laziness and undue dissipation had not held him
down. When his act had finished and he had cleaned the make-up from his
face, he returned to the table and remained there with Blanche until 2
A. M. After they left the place they entered a cab and he said: “What
d’you say to coming up to my joint for a while--I’m harmless, girlie, I
won’t make you cry on mother’s shoulder.”
“You are, and you’re going to stay that way,” she answered. “C’mon now,
tell James to drive over to Ninth Avenue, old dear.”
He made a grimace and did as she requested. He’d get her yet, no
fear, but there was no need for hurrying. It was always a fatal move
to expostulate with a woman at such a juncture. Again, she wasn’t
important enough to _him_ for any come-downs.
In the taxicab, he hugged and kissed her, and though she made little
resistance, an alertness contended against the liquor-fumes in her head
and counseled her to “look out.” As they stood in the hallway of her
building he became a trifle bolder, and she was passive for a while
and then stopped him. It wasn’t easy to hold out against him, and she
had barely been able to check the rising dizziness within her, but she
simply couldn’t let him win her as lightly as this. She had not drunk
sufficiently to reach a gigglingly helpless mood, although everything
_did_ seem to be jovially unimportant, and a dislike of him rose within
her. He was too confident, he was. She’d teach him a lesson, she would,
in spite of all of his physical appeal and his pleasant nerviness.
“You’re a little too fast--I can’t keep up with you,” she said.
“Besides, I’m getting the willies standing here all the time. Be a good
boy now, and let me go upstairs.”
“All right, girlie--game’s over,” he replied, gracefully taking his
defeat. “How about next Saturday--eight ’r so?”
“That suits, I’ll be on deck,” she said.
He kissed her again and went out to the waiting taxicab. As she entered
her room she had a droopy, misty feeling. Oh, well, another man turned
down--what did _she_ get out of it, anyway? It was funny, you wanted to
and you didn’t want to at the same time. She blinked at herself in the
mirror, and then turned out the light and went to sleep.